Entertainment.
As a collective society, we are just as dependent upon distractions as were those that peopled the Colosseum of Rome. We may have strayed a bit in terms of outright violence over the past few decades, but the intentions and origins are identically the same. We need to escape the everyday grind that we were thrust into by birth.
All work and no play, after all, makes us all very dull boys and girls.
And if there’s one thing that we don’t need in the world today, it’s another goddamn serial killer. So we watch shows about them. Listen to songs about them. Look at subjective art painted about (or by) them.
Boredom, people, is the watchword. Or then again, perhaps that’s not the watchword, after all; or if it is, perhaps it’s just a cognate for some other form of another word: control. The field of entertainment, possibly, is our our very own matrix. You don’t want people to loot and pillage? Keep them in the house watching Grey’s Anatomy DVDs for nights upon end!
But then again, that’s just open cynicism on my part. In truth, entertainment probably does deter an amount of violence and outright lawlessness because it creates an outlet. Having a bad day, kill some people on the PS3. Unleash your aggression upon the world in the confines of your own mind through an angsty and violent song. Happy, sing about that shit (only keep it to yourself, you insensitive bastard).
On the other hand, instead of a deterrent, we can also see the entertainment industry as an enabler. Let’s face it, our lives are boring as hell — otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this. Traipsing about the cosmos with a gang of miscreants, thwarting a terrorist attack, or robbing from the rich to give to yourself is a welcome hour-and-a-half escape from the office, isn’t it?
The bottom line is that whichever of the millions of stances that you might take of the entertainment industry, it’s there for each of us in one way or another. You may be goddamn tired of hearing Britney Spears clones on the radio, but on your harddrive is a plethora of tunes that get your heart pining for the fjords.
I love music. I love movies. I love television. I don’t love every facet of them, nor do I love all the things that they’ve come to represent in latter years, but at their core, I harbor a deep fascination with them each. And it’s with that fascination in mind that I write about them. I write about them across the blank canvas of my mind every day, a sort of running critique (if not narration) of the things I experience vicariously through someone else’s scope of creativity. Sometimes I even write them down (or type them out, I should say) for no one other than myself.
Why, then, shouldn’t I share the experience with the world? Or at the very least, the few people who stumble unknowingly upon this space of the internet that I call my own?
Dig deep, gentle readers, and pull up a proverbial chair in which you can absorb the non-wisdom that I seem to perpetually spew. Take it in stride, and remember that none of it really means anything. Because, after all… who the fuck am I but words upon a blank canvas.
